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CSS Class Inheritance: Abstracting Selectors

OOCSS (Object Oriented CSS) is a CSS Framework by Nicole Sullivan.
It is unique among the landscape of CSS frameworks – it consists of some basic CSS to get you started and best practices to help you build out webpages by adhering to a very strict separation of concerns at both the html content and CSS style levels. Like other CSS Frameworks, OOCSS expects you to build your content on top of your stylesheets instead of the other way around and it is well suited for sites that churn out lots of custom html pages that need to adhere to a common look and feel. The object oriented aspect of the framework is built on the concept of CSS Class Inheritance – a very powerful and natural concept. LessCSS also attempts to provide this feature via precompilation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really exist yet in either case. In this post, I’ll examine how css class inheritance would work, some possible syntaxes for it, and compare it to a very similar concept: the mixin. I’ll also describe the current limitations of OOCSS and LessCSS approaches and give my educated guess on what the future holds for this concept.

What is CSS Class Inheritance?

When a CSS selector inherits a CSS class it is as if that class is applied to all elements within the document that match the selector.

How is CSS Class Inheritance Specified?

Nicole has proposed a new property for CSS called “extends”. Let’s look at a simple example:

<div class="box">
This is a normal box.
</div>
<div class="important-box">
This is an important box.
</div>
<div class="error-box">
This is an error box.
</div>

Both of these approaches are interesting, but I find them both lacking:

The behavior of the extends property would be counter-intuitive. The natural behavior of “extend” or “inherit” is to accumulate, but there is no other style property that has that behavior. This would pose challenges for implementors and users alike who may assume that specifying extends overrides previous values. On the flip side, if the decision was made to have the extends property override previous values in the selector heirarchy, then we lose the concept of “encapsulation” which is core to the maintainability of stylesheets built using this technique. This is because a change to an extends property would have to be propagated manually to the inheriting selectors.

Unfortunately, the LessCSS approach introduces a new syntax for CSS parsers to understand but the use of a selector paves the way for allowing inheriting other types of selectors. I’m not sure that is a desirable thing yet because I’ve not fully thought through the ramifications, but I like that it keeps the option open.

The @extends Directive

I propose a hybrid syntax that I will use for the remainder of this post: The @extends directive:

<div class="box">
This is a normal box.
</div>
<div class="important-box">
This is an important box.
</div>
<div class="error-box">
This is an error box.
</div>

CSS Inheritance and Document Structure

Let’s consider a more complex example where the css class in question has interactions with the document structure. CSS inheritance should work in a way that is logical, consistent, and expected within the context of a document.

Consider the following document fragment:

HTML

<div class="grid">
<div id="top" class="row">
<div class="box"> This is a top box </div>
<div class="error-box"> This is also a top box </div>
</div>
<div id="middle" class="row">
<div class="important-box"> This is a middle box </div>
<div class="box"> This is also a middle box </div>
</div>
<div id="bottom" class="row">
<div class="box"> This is a bottom box </div>
<div class="important-box"> This is also a bottom box </div>
</div>
</div>

Why Is it Useful?

At this point you are probably thinking to yourself “Why not just put multiple classes on the html elements?” That’s a good question and there are a couple of reasons this is not preferable:

First and foremost, the answer is that this is more maintainable. The box abstraction should not be leaky and in practice it might be extending many classes that are purely presentational building blocks dealing with cross-browser concerns, clear-fixing, etc. that you needn’t concern yourself with every time you want to use that abstraction. This concept is called “encapsulation” and is fundamental to object oriented programming and to keeping code maintainable.

Multiple classes have the same specificity on an element, which means that the document order of the CSS will determine the resolution of the same property’s value. However, when you extend something, you are overriding the values of it, even if the document order says otherwise. That said, the chances that you’ll bump into this limitation of exactly the same specificity is quite rare. The more likely scenario is that you’ll have a more specific selector that is overriding both. If you do run into this issue, it’s usually fairly simple to work around by reorganizing your stylesheets.

Dealing with Multiple Inheritance

As noted by Nicole, one way to handle multiple inheritance is for the browser to maintain an ordered list of the classes that have been inherited. That list would be ordered first by the increasing selector weight of the applying selector and then by the inheritance order and lastly by document order. This order would then be used to determine property conflict resolution for selectors having the same specificity. This approach would incur a rendering performance penalty because the global resolution order cannot be precomputed.

Simulating Inheritance

CSS class inheritance can be approximated by a stylesheet compiler, but it cannot be truly implemented without knowledge of the DOM. In the examples above, our knowledge of the class inheritance tree allows us to rewrite selectors to reference the extended classes to match all the known subclasses. For example:

<div id="top" class="primary">
<div class="base">
This should have a red background.
</div>
<div class="extended">
This should also have a red background.
</div>
</div>
<div id="bottom" class="alternate">
<div class="base">
This should have a green background.
</div>
<div class="extended">
This should also have a green background.
</div>
</div>

This should have a red background.

This should also have a red background.

This should have a green background.

This should also have a green background.

It should be noted at the time of this posting, that LessCSS compiler does not perform any form of selector re-writing of extended classes, instead it only augments the definitions of the classes. I assume this is a bug that no one has noticed yet and that it will be fixed eventually. However, the more fundamental flaw cannot be fixed, but I’m eager to hear from real-world users of LessCSS whether it has affected them in a meaningful way.

Neither can a compiler correctly handle resolution of multiple inheritance given the algorithm above. Since a compiler works based solely on selector rewriting, document order is the only resolution mechanism. As such, the authors should take care to avoid inheriting from classes defined later in the document. My gut tells me that a counter-example exists where-in an author cannot reorder the stylesheet rules and achieve the desired result, but I’ve not been able to construct one. I leave this as an open challenge to prove whether or not such a counter-example exists.

As much as I like the idea of class inheritance, because of these confusing edge cases, I’m wary about introducing such a syntax into Sass. I feel that mixins are a much more predictable, and document agnostic, approach to abstraction. That said, an automatic selector rewriting capability is a very compelling feature in the most common real-world, use cases. I’m interested to hear your feedback.

UPDATE: @extend is in Sass 3

Thanks to the fact that Natalie was able find a compiler-based solution to many of the things I had thought just wouldn’t be possible, we have implemented @extend and it is part of the Sass 3 release. For example, here’s the same code example using Sass 3 to compile it:

<div id="top" class="primary">
<div class="base">
This should have a red background.
</div>
<div class="extended">
This should also have a red background.
</div>
</div>
<div id="bottom" class="alternate">
<div class="base">
This should have a green background.
</div>
<div class="extended">
This should also have a green background.
</div>
</div>

This should have a red background.

This should also have a red background.

This should have a green background.

This should also have a green background.

Mixins are not Class Inheritance

Mixins add implementation to a selector, but as we’ve seen, class inheritance adds implementation by changing the meaning of selectors by allowing the selectors to match against a base class. As such, a mixin is a useful tool that you could use to build your own class “hierarchies” manually and when coupled with Sass’s ability to nest selectors and permute them easily, it’s much easier to maintain your class definitions and related selectors than it would be in pure CSS. Of course, mixins can take arguments, and that makes them very useful in their own right. If CSS magically changed tomorrow to allow CSS Class inheritance, I would still need the mixin as a fundamental abstraction for creating stylesheets.

What does the future hold?

Let me get out my crystal ball. Ok. Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever have browser support for CSS class inheritance. No one is discussing adding such a feature to CSS3, and so CSS4 would be the earliest. Even if it was made part of an official specification, you’d not be able to use it for years because there’s no way to gracefully degrade. So maybe, if somehow we can convince the W3C to add support, you might be able to use this feature in 5 to 10 years from now – that’s roughly equivalent to forever in internet time.

In the meantime, I predict that CSS compilers will soon let you simulate inheritance where the descendent relationship can be inferred from the existing set of selectors. (Crazy, it was even sooner than I thought: xCSS was just released that implements extends using an augmented selector syntax.)

However, simply learning to think about CSS classes as extending other CSS classes is going to help you construct and manage your stylesheets and to keep a clean separation of concerns. Hopefully this post will also help you evaluate and understand the tools and frameworks that you have at your disposal, to understand their limitations, as well as their strengths.

About Me

I am an open source hacker and stylesheet architect at LinkedIn.
I live in San Jose, California with my wife and daughter.

Open Source

I'm the creator of Compass, a stylesheet authoring framework
and I'm on the core team of
Sass — the stylesheet syntax upon which Compass is built.
I maintain about a dozen less well known ruby libraries and rails plugins on
github,
and am an active contributor of patches to the many open source projects that I use.